How To Start A Blog-Easy To Follow Guide For Beginners

You’ve thought of touching the world with words.

Words that changes lives, and earn your a heroic status and respect with your readers.

Anytime you think of starting a blog, fear and failure steal your passion and enthusiasm. It paralyzes your fingers from pressing keystrokes.

Sometimes, you sit down and wonder whether you’ll ever start a blog. In fact, you’ve started buying the idea blogging is a suicide mission.

But inside you, lies a voice telling you that no matter what, you have what it takes to be successful like famous bloggers. You will create sizzling products and courses that your audience will love. You will finally live, the so called laptop life.

If you still have a tiny believe in that voice, this article is for you. If you still believe that there is time and you can do whatever it takes to be successful with blogging.

You’re the person that I am writing to. A few years ago, l was in the same shoes with wandering thoughts and feeling inadequate.

After squabbling for one year, I realized that to build a super blog, that people love you had to follow certain steps. Want to know the steps, here is the list.

Step 1: Choose A Popular, Successful Niche

Your niche won’t matter unless it falls into these categories. The main reason why some bloggers fail within the first one year, it is because they choose the topic based on what they think is perfect for them.

When choosing a niche, you need to make a decision based on data and not passion or wishful thinking. For instance, there are 11 major niches in the blogosphere. You need to choose a niche from these categories because of the following 3 reasons:

• It helps you grasp the most popular topics that your audience love
• The niche determines how you’ll find readers that will love your topic
• The influencers in your niche are likely to send you traffics

Here are the 11 niches that you can create a blog from:

• Business and entrepreneurship
• Careers
• Creative endeavors/hobbies
• Freelance
• Gadgets and technology
• Marketing
• Parenting
• News, culture and entrepreneurship
• Self-help
• Internet, social media and blogging.

Next, you need to find the subcategory in that topic. It’s simple, copy one of the category and paste it on amazon, then look at books. You’ll see major category, for instance, in personal finance, you will see the following subcategory: Investing, success self-help, budgeting, retirement plans.

Step 2: Uncover Your Audience’s Secret Obsession

If you’re starting a blog as a way to pass time between TV commercial, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. Instead of thinking about how blogging will make you rich, think of how you’ll make your reader’s life better.

To change your reader’s life, you need to understand their obsession. In other words, what are the things that are bugging them in the night.

What fears, frustration, desires and goals do they have. Finding your reader’s obsession is not easy as some people may think.

Let’s take an example from the freelance niche.

Let’s say you’re starting a blog about freelance niche in writing or copywriting category. Do you know the single thing that bugs these groups. Guess?

It is not finding their first client, it’s finding high-end clients that are willing to pay premium price for their services. Here is how you can identify their obsession.

• Desires: what they truly what or what things aren’t satisfied
• Goals that take time to achieve
• Fears that they have
• Frustration that must be completely solved.

Ask yourself: What desires, goals, fears and frustration do freelance writers want solved.

• Desires: earn more money
• Goals: charging high rates per clients
• Fears: dealing with a dry month with no clients
• Frustration: working 24/7 around the clock with low paying clients

If you look closely, these issues affect freelancer writers everywhere in the world. How do you come up with ideas that you’ll focus on your blog.

Desires: They are many ways to earn more as a freelancer writer. One way is to charge premium rates, getting more work or starting an agency. Ask yourself, how will my readers feel that they are on the right track to earning more money. Here is how they will describe their achievements of their desires:

” I landed a new client that offered to pay my premium rates”

” I started an agency and hired a writer to manage for me some writing tasks.”

” I got more work for the month at a premium rate.”

Goals: Charging high rates per client

Big goals are rarely achieved all at once, it takes time. The end results is usually embedded in small little steps. Use the word “I” to describe what you reader will feel when they achieved their goals or solved their frustration. Let’s get inside your reader’s mindset to find out the results they will show that they achieved their goals

“I agreed on a premium rate with my client”

” I landed a new client that paid me double my rate”

Hope you got my examples. Take the above exercises and write down 20 goals, 20 frustrations, 20 fears and 20 desires. The answers don’t really matter that much. You’re aiming to dig deep into your readers’ live and understand what is happening.

Step 3: Creating A Mission Statement

You need to have a bold statement describing what your blog is about. A statement tells your audience, what you do and how you help them.

A mission statement looks like a slogan. It makes it easy for readers to find answers to questions that they have. When a reader lands on your site, they are asking themselves lots of questions like:

• How your blog will help them
• Asking themselves, whether they are at the right place
• They’re curious as to whether you have the ideal solution to their problem.

How do you come up with an excellent mission statement. You can use the templates below to create one for your own:

I teach(audience) how to (achievement)

I help(audience) how get( specific)

In the freelance niche, your blog’s topic can be something like:

• I teach copywriters how to negotiate like a professional lawyer
• I help copywriters how to triple their revenue

Now take time to write down your own example of mission statement. Don’t just write two like I did, write as much and choose the best one for you.

Step 4: Choosing and Registering A Domain Name

The next step is choosing a memorable domain name. They are four ways you can come up with a domain name.

Name the benefit you provide to the audience. Fill your blog topic in the blank. I will teach you to be (blank) or how to (blank)

Topic 2: name the audience. E.g Problogger

Example: blank+ only like SmartFreelancersOnly.com

Topic 3: (adjective) + (audience name)

Like afineparent.com

Topic 4: Name the topic

Example: I will teach to earn more or how to earn more

Step 5: Getting A Hosting Account.

If you have a domain name, then you need a host account for your website. I recommended Siteground as your hosting provider because they have excellent support. In fact, if you have a problem or concern they will be quick to get to you in a few minutes.

Step 6: Choosing A Theme

The appearance of your blog matters. You can hire a designer to design the look and feel of your website.

There are thousands of pre-made themes on the internet. If you’re serious with blogging you need to invest in a premium theme for your site.

There is a great SEO benefit to having a premium theme. You can get a premium theme for less than $100. Places that you can buy a premium theme includes: thrive theme, Studiopress theme and Elegant themes.

You will look professional with a premium WordPress theme. Most free themes that come with WordPress don’t have technical support. They have been abandoned by most developers. Unlike free themes, premium themes are constantly being updated with every WordPress upgrade.

In other words, you will have the support, customization and maintenance that you need from the developers.

Step 7: The Must-Have Plugins

You need a few WordPress plugins to up your WordPress performance and functionality. Here are some common WordPress plugins that you site needs.

Site performance: You need a site that loads pages at a blazing speed. When it comes to site performance, WP Super Cache because it’s capable of maximizing your blog’s load time for visitors.

Analytics: Google analytics is free for everyone. You pay nothing installing this plugin. All you need is to get over to Google analytics page and get a tracking code that you’ll paste on your websites. If your traffic increases with time, you may need a paid analytics program to give you real feedback on about your site.

SEO. For beginners Yoast Plugin or All in One SEO plugin would be perfect to go. At this time, don’t get obsessed with SEO, trying to get everything right. SEO is complicated, it is something you will understand better as your site ages. At first, your main focus is should be writing great articles and promoting. When it comes to SEO only pay focus to on-page SEO.

Social Sharing: Your blogs need a social sharing plug that makes it easier for people to share your content. Digg Digg plugins is a free tool that comes with floating social sharing button. You can put it on your blog.

Step 8: Create An Irresistible Bribe or Incentives

No reader will give you their email on a silver platter. You must give them something back. Take time to create a free report or a downloadable ebook. A bribe will help grow your email list fast.

A simple ebook doesn’t need to be 100 pages long. Aim for 5000 or 6000 words ebook enough to fill the most important content you have.

How do you come up with an irresistible bribe? If you have done the exercise about uncovering your audience in the earlier steps, you now have a profound idea of what is ailing them..

You can make an ebook based on that. Your ebook needs to have the attention grabbing titles. If you don’t know how to choose a title, head over to Buzzfeed.com and click on the trending topics.

You can copy and tailor these topics for your ebook. To get people thirsting for your ebook, all you need is an attention grabbing headline. And if you stole one from Buzzfeed pros, you’ll be way ahead.

Step 9: Launching Your Blog With A Bang!!!

Tap yourself on the shoulder for getting over the technical part of getting a domain name and a hosting account. At this stage, you’re probably thinking of writing your first post?

Don’t publish your first post. In fact, there is no point writing a post if the only people that will read it are your families and friends.

Instead, start guest posting. In other words, write guest posts for bloggers in your niche. There are many benefits of writing a guest post.

First, you’ll form relationships with influencers in your niche. The influencers in your niche are your allies, not your enemies. They are the one that will send traffic to you in future and make you popular

In fact, in your first 6 months or a year, focus on building relationship and writing a guest post for them. After you’ve got some readers , that is when you can start writing your first post.

Getting Better At Blogging

The key to building a super blog is not writing for your audience. It is building solid relationships with the influencers in your industry. Influencers are the people that determine your success. The main reasons why people fail, it is because they didn’t build solid relationships with influencers early on their career. Imagine a simple tweet or facebook post by an influencer can send you a lots of traffic.

If you get overwhelmed with most steps that I have described above at least do two steps which are important. Create a bribe and start doing a guest post. Only after, you have gathered readers, that’s when you will start sharing your ideas with them. Blogging is like a classroom, like every classroom, you need students. Same thing with blogging.

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